tags: #publish links: [[Management]] created: 2023-10-04 Wed --- # Goal-setting philosophy *Can I change my goal if the situation changes so it isn't attainable?* Of course! The question about attainability hides deeper questions: - How are we thinking about “met” / “didn’t meet”? - What does it mean if a goal isn’t met? - What does it mean if a goal isn’t met _because the situation changed,_ rather than because the person didn’t succeed? **Assessment of success given a goal** _has_ to be a bit subjective. We’re assessing humans and complex situations. It’s never going to be that measurable. If our assessment of performance is rigidly just a binary test of “*did you meet, on paper, all the goals you set 6 months ago*”, that’d be a system with a lot of noise/inaccuracy, and behaviour-distorting misincentives. Don't do that. People will set easy goals and hit them. People will devalue work that doesn't match a written goal. If the assessment and growth convo is more like “*have a realistic conversation about progress on the goals and the situation and your actions, value highly successful delivery of some of them, but don’t unfairly penalise the person if the situation changed so it couldn’t/shouldn’t be achieved*”, then that seems far more sensible, and there’s also no reason you couldn’t introduce new goals or change the existing goals mid-process if the situation changes. The “goal” in these discussions is more of a KR than an outcome goal? It isn’t usually the real purpose (e.g. “help the team up to ship more business value”), just an instrumental measurement (e.g. “reduce build times by X”). We should be able to change the goals (KRs) if the situation changes such that we need to incentivise a different KR to get to the outcome, and that doesn’t dilute the value of the goals system, it makes it _more adaptable to incentivising the things we want_.